Command line arguments

A few command line arguments are processed by Scheme 48 as
it starts up.

scheme48
[-iimage]
[-hheapsize]
[-aargument ...]

-iimage

specifies a heap image file to resume. This defaults to a heap
image that runs a Scheme command processor. Heap images are
created by the ,dump and ,build commands, for which see below.

-hheapsize

specifies how much space should be reserved for allocation.
Heapsize is in words (where one word = 4 bytes), and covers both
semispaces, only one of which is in use at any given time (except
during garbage collection). Cons cells are currently 3 words, so
if you want to make sure you can allocate a million cons cells,
you should specify -h 6000000 (actually somewhat more than this,
to account for the initial heap image and breathing room).
The default heap size is 3000000 words. The system will use a
larger heap if the specified (or default) size is less than
the size of the image being resumed.

-aargument ...

is only useful with images built using ,build.
The arguments are passed as a list of strings to the procedure specified
in the ,build command as for example:

The usual definition of the s48 or scheme48 command is actually a
shell script that starts up the Scheme 48 virtual machine with a
-i imagefile
specifying the development environment heap image and a
-o vm-executable specifying the location of the virtual-machine
executable (the executable is needed for loading external code on some
versions of Unix; see section *for more information).
The file go in the Scheme 48 installation source directory is an example
of such a shell script.